so far—and I'm well into the magazine—is Todd Pruzan's "Global Warning." [Update: It's now a gorgeously produced book, The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World. How can you resist?]

But back to our story. "Global Warning" isn't the winningest of New Yorker headlines, considering the subtle elegance of Pruzan's storytelling. But if you don't read this, you'll be sorry. Subtitled "Mrs. Mortimer's Guide to the World," it's all about a Victorian geography-book and children's-morality-primer writer whose work was incredibly popular, all the more incredibly (to many) because her views were so preposterously prejudiced against pretty much everybody.

Pruzan writes, after reading Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer on "the habits of German women":

The passage's escalating scorn, with its absolutist damnation of silly women and smoking and novels, actually startled me. Half an hour later, my friends and I sat around our back yard, drinking beer and passing the book around, hooting and slapping our wooden picnic table as we read aloud from the little book's casual condemnations of the Portugese ("indolent, like the Spaniards"), the Poles ("they speak so loud they almost scream"), and the Icelanders "I think it would almost make you sick to go to church in Iceland").

What I like best is that Pruzan, who became intrigued enough with Mortimer's story that he edited a collection of her writing (due out in June; nothing's even been published about her since a 1950 letter to The New Yorker by her grandniece), begins by mocking her seemingly whimsical bigotry, but gradually begins to wonder what brought her to write as she did and who she was.

He praises Mortimer's writing style as "direct, persuasive, forceful," and Pruzan's is that, plus; reading this piece is like lying in a stream and letting water rush over you. It's really funny, too. He sympathizes with Mortimer's considerable trials and shakes his head at her (as he labels it) sadism. Then he goes to the overgrown graveyard, established circa 1322, of an English coastal town to search for her headstone! Now that's what I call a critic at large.

The only essay I've liked this much recently is Ian Frazier's memoir of hitchhiking and neighbor-gazing in Ohio. Who is Todd Pruzan, anyway? The Contributors page is no help—it's a riddle, reinforcing what we already knew (that he's the author of The Clumsiest People in Europe, which comes out in June).

But what else? My very intimate friend Google leads me safely to the arms of Gothamist, which has a witty interview with him from last year. Bloomsbury confirms that he's an editor at Print magazine, which fits with his tale of fondling dusty old books in Martha's Vineyard till Mrs. Mortimer's caught his eye.

We may have another Donald Antrim situation on our hands. (That's admiration, people, not stalking.) Give this man a three-part series!

Test Yourself for Hidden Bias [Southern Poverty Law Center]